Chapter 40
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They stepped through to the kitchen. On the way, he said, “Maybe your friend standing in the hallway would like to join us for coffee, too.”
Scarlett heard the footsteps as he entered the room. The stranger was instantly familiar.
“Good to see you, Cody,” he said. “I knew you’d find me.”
Patterson turned abruptly when he heard his own voice. His face broke into a big grin followed immediately by tears neither man could control.
The two brothers came together into a hard embrace as if they’d just won the biggest contest on earth as a team. Perhaps they had.
Scarlett turned to the kitchen to find the coffee pot and give them some privacy.
Nancy joined her. “I don’t know where Beto keeps anything in here.”
When they finally stepped apart, Patterson remained gobsmacked. “They told me you were dead.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around,” Kyle replied with a wry grin. “Believe me, I came close enough several times.”
The small kitchen held the four of them with no room to spare. Kyle found mismatched mugs in a cabinet and Nancy poured from the percolator on the stove. Patterson folded a matchbook under the short leg of the table to stop its wobble.
Patterson set down his mug and looked at his brother.
“How are you alive, Kyle? You told me to wait for your call, and to open the envelope if you didn’t call again within a few days. You never called, so I opened the envelope,” Patterson said. “After that I was sure they’d killed you in San Diego and put your body on the plane that went down.”
“Because I never walked into the trap.” Kyle wrapped both hands around the mug.
“Ten years I hunted Edward Quinn, ever since he sold Walt the pills that killed him. I finally ran him down in San Diego, living as Craig Keane, selling real estate in Texas like he’d never harmed a soul in his life.
I stood on the sidewalk and looked him in the face, and he knew I’d made him.
” He shook his head slowly. “After that I was a dead man and I knew it. So when they set up a meeting to finish me off, I didn’t go.
I pulled the SIM out of my phone, put it in the package with my notes, and mailed it to you.
Then I got in my truck and drove out of town.
I heard about the Gulfstream explosion later that same day.
At that point, I was supposed to be dead.
I figured I was better off dead until I could figure out what to do. ”
“The men who came to kill you,” Scarlett said. “What happened to them?”
“I didn’t know until later. They were the two pilots of that Gulfstream.” Kyle grimaced. “The news said four souls lost. I read it in a diner in Yuma. That’s when I knew the trap had closed on them and that they thought it closed on me.”
Scarlett turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. “Then how did you find Nancy?”
“I was an insurance investigator for a long time. And a damn good one. Insurance fraud goes on all the time. People think they’re clever.
Most of the time, they’re just wrong.” Kyle glanced at Nancy.
“I found her the same way I found everything else. Old school so I couldn’t be traced.
No electronics. Cash only. A new burner phone every day once I sent my SIM to Cody.
Talking to people who don’t talk to anybody. ”
“Your whole focus was on Edward Quinn?” Scarlett asked.
“Until I figured out he became Craig Keane. Then I focused on the people who erased him down to nothing and rebuilt him like a new person,” Kyle continued. “I figured if Craig’s wife really died on that plane, fine. But if she didn’t, she was the one person left alive who might know where he is.”
“So you went looking for a dead woman,” his brother said.
“Took me four months. A woman with no money and no name runs back to the only ground she trusts.” He set the mug down. “I got to her six weeks before they did. Mostly because they started later. They were so sure she was dead, they didn’t bother to look for a while when her trail was fresher.”
“He keeps saying Craig was mixed up in something.” Nancy had gone still over her coffee, and her voice had an edge under the tiredness.
“I never heard the name Edward Quinn in my life until Kyle asked me in a bus station. Craig was very low key. Small time real estate developer in Langford. You’re telling me he was tangled up with people who blow airplanes out of the sky? ”
“It’s the only thing that fits,” Kyle said, gently. “Craig crossed those people somehow. Or maybe it was my fault, since I did find him. Either way, they put him on that plane. And you were a loose end because a wife knows things even when she believes she doesn’t.”
“I don’t know anything.” Nancy looked at Scarlett. “I keep telling him. I don’t know one useful thing.”
“Maybe not,” Scarlett said. “But I can’t make what happened to that Gulfstream add up any other way either, and I’ve tried.”
Nancy was quiet a moment. “That’s the part I can’t get past. I lived with that man for years and the only story that explains why he’s dead is one where I never knew him at all.”
“You’ll square it in time,” Patterson said softly, probably trying to soothe her. “You don’t have to do it tonight.”
“Here’s where we actually are,” Scarlett said. “We found you, and we found Kyle. We’re no safer than we were this morning. The man who bombed my safe house is still at large. He won’t walk away until the job is done.”
“We’ll keep moving,” Kyle said. “It’s kept us alive this long.”
“I’m afraid that’s not an answer I can live with,” Scarlett replied. “I’ve got a business and a daughter and too many responsibilities to live on the road.”
Nobody had a better answer. They sat with their cooling coffee in a stranger’s kitchen, four people who’d finally found each other and gained nothing.
A long pause in the conversation left them each with their thoughts.
In the silence, the back door came off its hinges with a single flat crack.
Instantly, Scarlett jumped up, her chair went over behind her. An armed intruder came through the shattered doorway fast and low with his pistol raised.
He fired into the kitchen. The round hit Kyle high in the shoulder and spun him into the counter. Nancy screamed and Patterson dragged her down behind the table, clawing for the gun under his jacket.
Scarlett got her own pistol clear and put two rounds where the man had been, but he wasn’t there anymore.
He was fast. He came along the wall through the gun smoke. She saw the bandage wrapped tight on his forearm before she saw his face. The man from the Houston motel. The one who’d exploded her safe house on top of her and destroyed her SUV while they took shelter inside.
He swept Patterson’s first shot aside with his wounded arm and drove his gun hand against the wall. Patterson’s pistol skittered under the stove.
Then he jumped on Patterson, who was almost sixty and slow. The attacker was neither.
Scarlett didn’t have a clean shot with the two of them tangled.
So she covered the few feet between them at a dead run. She slammed into his side with everything she had. All her weight hit low into his ribs. The three of them went down hard against the table leg Patterson had shimmed.
The killer rolled with the shove. He was strong and he knew exactly what he was doing. In a heartbeat, he pulled a knife from his belt and sliced the blade up toward her throat.
Scarlett caught his wrist in both hands. The knife point hung an inch off her skin and was slowly edging closer.
She turned her whole body into his bandaged arm, driving her thumb deep into the wrapped forearm where the burn underneath was raw. He grunted and faltered for half a moment.
Half a moment was all she needed.
Scarlett wrenched his knife hand down and around and used his own strength against him. She shoved the blade in under his sternum all the way to the hilt.
His eyes widened in surprise, as if he were shocked by her self-defense skills. They always were.
Then his strength drained and he fell slowly onto the cracked linoleum. He didn’t move again.
The kitchen became unnaturally quiet. Scarlett knelt over the dead man, her hands shaking now that the adrenaline started to fade. The smell of gunshots and warm blood and spilled coffee thick in the little room.
“Kyle’s hit,” Patterson said, on his knees beside his brother. “Shoulder wound. Through and through. He’ll keep.”
“Yeah,” Kyle agreed through his teeth, a hand clamped over the wound.
Scarlett pushed herself up. One dead operative. One wounded man who would live. A back door that didn’t exist anymore. And no way to know if this one had come alone or whether there was another behind him in the dark.
She turned and found Nancy by the stove, pressed against the cabinets, staring at the body on the floor with a flat, far-off stare, realizing she was out of room to run.
They waited for the next attack. When it didn’t come, Scarlett found Nancy, still huddled in the corner. “It’s over. For tonight, it’s over. You’re all right, Nancy. Everything will be okay.”
“We need to get Kyle to the hospital,” Patterson said. “Let’s go.”